Amiri Baraka calls Mirage “A fine book—important on painting.”

Basil King attended Black Mountain College as a teenager in the 1950s, and completed his apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist painter in San Francisco and New York. Since that time, his art has taken a different turn, reaching through abstraction back to surrealism and forward into a new approach to the figure. Although he did not begin to write regularly until 1986, an involvement with poetry has always been part of his life, first in doing art to accompany poems in books and magazines, later as a book artist, now as a poet/painter.